Although the Recording Industry Association of America would have you believe that people who connect to online peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks are the worst criminals on the face of the Earth, they’re actually pouring more money into the industry than those who don’t engage in file sharing.

According to the American Assembly, which completed an exhaustive study into the Web surfing and buying habits of thousands of people in the United States and Germany, that supposedly toxic segment of the population spends 30% more on legal music than the perfectly clean non-pirates out there.

The study found that the average P2P user in the US has a music collection that consists of 24% illegally downloaded songs compared to 38% that were purchased legally. The rest are either ripped from CDs or copied offline from friends or family.

There are a lot of arguments to be make here. Obviously, those who have the knowledge to use P2P networks are already technologically adept so they are probably going to climb the scales higher on any question related to online consumption. In addition, there is the argument that if music piracy was more strongly prohibited, these same consumers would spend even more on legal music.

On the flip side, it could be that users download illegal music files just to test the waters and if they find an artist they like, they’ll end up buying song after song that they would have never found otherwise.

The bottom line is that it always helps to be grounded back to reality. There is this mindset out there that people who connect to P2P networks are just leeches who expect to get everything they want and not have to pay for it. While that is certainly a segment of the P2P community, it is not indicative of the community as a whole.

Reader Comments

Hodar

This basically supports the assertion that has been made for over a decade. P2P users are “super-users”, in that they are curious about almost everything. They may have a copy of the full-fledged Photoshop (but have only booted it up twice). They may have tons of games – but they also BUY tons of stuff. If you are dropping what amounts to THOUSANDS of dollars on games, music and movies – you don’t want to buy crap. Once opened, you cannot return a disk. So, the choice is simple – either sample the artist’s offerings or buy blind. You take a car for a test drive don’t you? Why not a game, movie or song? But, no …. let’s criminalize the biggest customer the industry has, and then wonder why people like me havent’ bought a game, CD or DVD in nearly 5 years. Declare war on me, and I’ll simply use Netflix, Hulu or RedBox. If I like the movie, I’ll just drop $1.20 and rip a copy from a Redbox rental. With jumpdrives cheap and plentiful – they get shared in a manner that can’t be easily traced, documented or prosecuted. With Rosewill hard drive ports with USB3 at $30, I can move Terabytes to my friends’s house in a matter of hours.